Unity Linux Developer Team Blog

well, I finally decided to return to bootsplash for the oncoming release. Splashy is just not stable enough for daily use.

We’ve been busy since Build 3 with seven releases for testing purposes (uploading as we speak). So what’s new? Bootsplash is back as is the 2.6.29.5 kernel. I’m waiting on kernel-2.6.30.1 to be released to fix a few bugs I’ve encountered.
I’ve fixed most of the issues with the livecd with the exception of the errors messages during the shutdown period but those are harmless (still on my todo list though).

I’ve started collecting all the information, and work related to the logo and graphics and should be able to present a fairly decent sample for team to start voting. I’m hoping to complete that phase within a week.

I finally got a handle on xorg-1.6.1 and have successfully created a first test iso. There are still several broken elements but we need to rebuild the various DE against it so I’m pushing the changes forward even if it’s in an unfinished state to allow everyone to start updating the various DE.

From Mdawkin’s comments, it seems that the basesystem is almost complete which is really good news.

I finally got to integrate Mandriva’s fastboot and I have to admit that they did a brilliant job there. There are still a few teething problems but there’s no denying the quality of their work.

Now we need to focus on getting the graphics together to get the first alpha release out.

The kernel is completed and the various available backends for rpm (Apt and Smart so far) have been rebuilt. I’ve rebuilt rpm-4.4.6 to give us a transition period but this will be short lived as it is incompatible with the newer versions (being either rpm4.6 from RH or rpm5). We will need to decide to go with one of them.

With that purpose in mind we are holding a dev meeting tomorrow to sort this issue and decide on the preferred backend for rpm looking into the future.

Finally the management positions are being filled in for the first term of office. More of that later on.

We finally got the toolchain updated and we have a 2.6.29 kernel ready. The guys have really done an amazing work and so far there hasn’t been many frictions (which is surprising when you consider that we’ve reached a 26 strong team). It’ll get easier as the guys creates teams following their affinities.

We are working on getting rpm updated and hopefully should have x11-server-1.6 ready this week. So hopefully we will then have the initial test build for all the team to start packaging apps.

Hello and thanks for reading the Unity Linux development blog. We have a few developers that will be using this blog as a platform for letting people know what they’re up to. Frequency of updates will be entirely up to each developer but hopefully, we’ll communicate clearly and often!